


Cold December Nights

by smkkbert



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Christmas Fluff, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-09 08:06:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5531990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smkkbert/pseuds/smkkbert
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU in which Oliver and Felicity spend Christmas Eve together although they barely know each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cold December Nights

**Author's Note:**

  * For [multi_fandom_crazy_fangirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/multi_fandom_crazy_fangirl/gifts).



> This fic was written for Olicity Secret Santa 2015 as a gift to multi_fandom_crazy_fangirl.

_Stockings are hung with care_  
As children sleep with one eye open  
Well, now there’s more than toys at stake  
Cause I’m older now but not done hoping. 

_The twinkling of the lights_  
The scent of candles fill the household  
Old Saint Nick has taken flight  
With a heart on board so please be careful.

_Each year I ask for many different things  
But now I know what my heart wants you to bring._

Why were there annoying Christmas carols played everywhere he went, Oliver wondered with a sigh and looked back to the paper in his hand.

There was just no end to this. One word was followed by the next, one number by the other. They connected to what seemed like a number of pages that had no end. His view blurred more and more in front of his eyes, the headache increasing with every line he read. But Oliver didn’t stop. He should have read the annual report when his executive assistant had put it onto his desk last week, but he had delayed reading it again and again. Now it was long overdue.

Turning the page, Oliver silently cursed himself for not having read the report earlier. If he had started reading it immediately, he would have been able to take his time with it and wouldn’t have to rush through it like he had to now. Besides, there were probably more enjoyable activities he could do the day of Christmas Eve.

A soft tapping on his shoulders pulled him out of his self-pitying thoughts. He turned his head to see an index finger on his shoulder and then lifted his gaze to find two beautiful blue eyes that were framed by thick frames of glasses looking back at him. It took a short moment, a moment he simply stared at her eyes, before he could take in her whole face. The young blonde was smiling shyly at him, the corners of her full, red-painted lips uplifted slightly.

“Hi, sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you,” she said hastily. “You just seemed deeply in thought and I have been talking to you for the last three minutes and I don’t think you heard any of that which is probably a good thing because I use to ramble and you would probably think that I am crazy if you had heard me speak. I mean… you probably think I am crazy now because I am talking really quickly, but your eyes! Has anyone ever told you that you eyes are the bluest blue that has ever been the color of someone’s eyes? And now I said that out loud although I kept telling myself that I shouldn’t say it because it is totally inappropriate to say something like this to a stranger and- you are laughing about me. Yeah, I get that. Okay, I will go now before this is going to get any more embarrassing for me and-“

When she turned away and took the first step away from him, Oliver hurried to catch her hand that had slowly moved from his shoulder where it had stayed during her whole ramble. She turned back around to him and looked at him in surprise. A deep blush had turned her face red. Oliver had to bite his tongue to not smile even more. Something about her ramble and the red color of her cheeks was weirdly refreshing to him, which was why he hadn’t laughed about her like she assumed, but rather grinned to himself like an idiot without knowing that the smile had actually spread on his face and hadn’t only been in his mind.

“What did you want to say?”

“Hm?” she made, perking her eyebrows in question.

“Well, there has to be a reason that you came to me, right?”

“It wasn’t to tell you that your eyes are amazing,” she mumbled, probably unaware that she was saying that. “Or that the rest of your face and body is just as handsome as your eyes.”

Oliver had to bite his tongue even harder. He couldn’t remember when he had last met someone who was this adorable from the first second the last time. But the blonde seemed so natural, so pure in her behavior that Oliver couldn’t help but feel his headache slightly easing more and more away with every second he kept looking at her.

“So when you haven’t come here to tell me that my eyes and the rest of my face and body are amazing, then why did you come here?” he asked when she made no attempt to continue.

Her eyes widened in horror, telling him that he had been right about the fact that he hadn’t known that she had said that out loud even before she asked, “Did I saw that out loud?”

He nodded slightly, and the blonde slapped her free hand, the one he wasn’t still holding in his, in front of her eyes, the red color in her face deepening even more.

“Oh my God,” she whined. “I just came here to ask if you mind when I sit down at your table because every table is taken and I don’t need much room, so I thought maybe we could share. If I had been smarter, I would have probably written down this question on a napkin and acted like I am mum. It would have so increased my chances for you to agree. My brain-to-mouth-filter is lacking anyway, but it is the worst before I get any coffee.”

Oliver smiled and reached out his hand to his mug of coffee to hold it out for her. When she only looked at him in question, he nodded to the empty chair at the other side of the table and suggested, “Sit down and have the rest of my coffee before the waitress comes here to take your order and you get your own coffee.”

When she hesitated, he tugged at her hand until she stood right next to the empty chair and slipped the mug right into her small hand. He watched as she bit down on her bottom lip insecurely. Only when he smiled encouragingly, she nodded.

She took a sip of his coffee and scrunched her nose disgustedly.

“No milk, no sugar,” Oliver explained.

“And completely cold,” the blonde added, putting the mug on the table.

“Oh, sorry,” he said, hastily lifting his hand to signal the waitress that they needed two more mugs of coffee, and the woman behind the counter nodded with a smile.

“Thanks for the offer anyway,” the blonde said, putting her purse on the floor and her table on the edge of the tabletop. When she took off her red coat, Oliver watched her high ponytail sway back and forth. “And thanks for letting me have this side of the table. I will keep strictly to my side and not bother you, so I will let you get back to whatever I interrupted with my ramble and shut up.”

To emphasize her words she pressed her lips together tightly and moved her thumb and index finger over the seam of them like she was zipping her mouth. Oliver smiled and nodded slowly, unable to help the slight disappointment about the ending of their conversation. But he lowered his gaze to the annual report in his hands and tried to figure out where he had stopped reading. If he didn’t get through with this today, he would have to continue reading during the next days and considering how busy his family always was during the holidays, he knew that there just wouldn’t be enough time for that.

So Oliver tried to delve back into the pages, but the fact that he could very well see the blonde from the edge of his visual field distracted him so much that he didn’t even notice what words and numbers he read. His eyed moved over the lines, but his brain didn’t process any of the information ahead. Instead his thoughts seemed all too focused on processing what he could watch the blonde do from the edge of his visual field.

First he watched her getting comfortable. She was sliding back and forth on her chair a little before she seemed to have found the right position. She switched on her tablet and attached it to the keyboard. Licking the seam of her lips, she moved her fingers and wrists like she was warming them up before a game of sports. Taking in a deep breath, she lowered her fingers on the keyboard and started typing in a pace that could indeed count as sports. Smiling slightly to himself, he tried to concentrate on the annual report once more.

“Sorry, it took this long,” the waitress said as soon as she stepped to their table two minutes later to refill Oliver’s mug of coffee and poured the blonde one, too.

When he thanked the waitress, he used the opportunity to glance over to the blonde. Her eyes were completely focused on the tablet while her fingers were still dancing over the keyboard quickly. Her lips were moving like she was talking, but no sound escaped her mouth. It took her five full minutes before she seemed to sense his gaze on her skin. The moment she started lifting her face to look at him, her fingers not stopping typing, he quickly lowered his gaze back to not be caught staring at her. From the edge of his visual field he could see her frowning like she was unsure whether she had just imagined that he had been staring at her. Her eyes lowered back onto the display of her tablet and she continued like nothing had happened.

Oliver again tried to concentrate on his reading, and again found himself distracted by the pretty blonde across the table. She stopped typing, reached into her purse and pulled out a little notepad and a red pen. She took a note he couldn’t see, but from the way her gaze switched between the paper in her lap and the tablet on the table, he assumed that she copied what she saw there. She left the notepad in her lap and held the pen between her teeth.

He waited a little, making sure that she was concentrated on typing again, before he allowed himself to risk lifting his gaze and looking at her more directly once again. He didn’t know what it was about her, but there was just something about her, something that made him feel… something.

The drifting off of his thoughts distracted him a second too long, and when the blonde looked up this time, he wasn’t able to look away soon enough. Their eyes met for the split of a second. But they both hastily looked away. Oliver lifted the annual report in front of his face, hiding behind it. If he hadn’t been that sure that she was still looking at him or was at least aware of what he was doing, he would have face-palmed himself.

What the hell was going on with him here, he wondered. He wasn’t a shy guy. He wasn’t someone to shoot sneaking looks at a foreign woman who sat right across his table. He was the kind of guy who would just introduce himself and start a conversation, so he could ask for a date.

Why didn’t he do that now? The blonde was pretty, she was funny and something or maybe everything about her attracted him. Admittedly, she wasn’t his usual type. He couldn’t put a finger on what exactly made her different from other girls he had dated, but he just knew that there was something different about her. He just knew it. And this something different made him differ from his usual habit.

Oliver didn’t even try to read the report anymore. Instead he tried to figure out what to do now. Was he going to ask her out or was he just going to stay silent? He didn’t even know why he was hesitating. The case was clear, wasn’t it?

He put down the report, sliding forward on his chair until he was sitting on the edge and putting his hands on the tabletop. The blonde looked up from her tablet, her fingers slowing down their dance over the keyboard until they came to a stop. They still hovered above the keys, though, ready to start their work again any time. Just when he opened his mouth to say something, his phone beeped.

“Sorry,” he said hastily, pulling his phone out of the pocket of his coat and checking the new message.

_Ollie, where are you? Mom is driving me insane and I want to meet Roy. So you have to help mom with the preparations for the party tonight. Come home ASAP!_

Roy – his little sister’s boyfriend and thorn in his flesh. His sister was too young to date. Hadn’t she only been born yesterday? It felt that way. It really did, even if he knew that Thea was twenty already. It just didn’t sit well with him who she was dating or rather that she was dating at all.

“Bad news?” the blonde asked with a worried wrinkle between her eyebrows.

“Not exactly,” Oliver replied with a tense smile, putting his phone back into the pocket of his coat and hastily downing the rest of his almost cool coffee. “But I gotta go. My family needs me.”

The blonde nodded with a smile and lowered her gaze back to her tablet, starting to work once more. Oliver watched her while he was putting on his coat and rummaged around in the all of the pockets of his clothes for his money. When he found his wallet in the back pocket of his jeans, he pulled out some dollar notes, including a giant tip for the poor souls who had to work during the holidays. He dropped them onto the tabletop, shooting a short gaze to the waitress to make sure that she saw. The blonde didn’t look back up once during that time.

“Merry Christmas,” he said, already taking the first steps away.

“I’m Jewish.”

He turned back around to her, seeing her looking back at him with an unreadable expression in her face. He smiled softly, responding, “Happy Chanukah.”

With that he started walking away. The moment was over and he had missed his chance.

 

How had Christmas always been his favorite holiday in the year, Oliver wondered while he was strolling through the empty city with his hands deep inside of the pockets of his coat and his gaze lowered to the sidewalk. This year hadn’t been an exception. He had been looking forward to spending some quality family time, even when his parents were hosting a Christmas party, to which a lot more people than those who counted as family or friends had been invited.

He had still looked forward to it because he just loved Christmas. But first Tommy and Laurel had canceled because Tommy was sick and Laurel was taking care of him. Then Sara had called to tell that she had missed her flight thanks to a holiday acquaintance, and was still stuck somewhere in Asia. His parents had fought about something he hadn’t completely understood, but had acted normally for their guests. Thea and her boyfriend had snuck upstairs during the party, doing God knows what. He had wanted to stop her, but his little sister was just as stubborn as he was, and he knew in the back of his mind that she was old enough to decide for herself. Which didn’t mean that he had to like it or even worse watch her making those decisions.

So he had left the party without any word to his parents or anyone else. He had driven around in his car a little until he had decided that he needed some air and had parked his car to just stroll through the city. Nobody was outside since everyone was probably spending time with their families and friends. It was only him.

Oliver didn’t really know where he was going. He just walked around blindly, no destination in mind.

He didn’t know how long he was walking already or what time it was when he decided that he needed coffee or something else to drink. He didn’t really care about the time, either, because there was probably nobody noticing that he had left anyway. Since he was near his favorite coffee shop, he headed in the next street to his right then the third one left and then he could see the coffee shop at the end of the street already.

The second half of the annual report was still waiting for him in his room, needing to be read. After he had come home this morning, there hadn’t been any time to continue reading because his mother had kept him busy with preparations for the party. He hadn’t had any free minute then and thanks to the beautiful blonde he hadn’t really read much of the report before, either.

The thought about the blonde made a smile spread on his lips when he entered the coffee shop. He took a short look around, finding the waitress behind the counter. She was sitting on a chair, reading a book. She hadn’t much to do Oliver realized when his gaze took in the empty tables. Nobody was here, every table was-

No, not every table was free. The smile on Oliver’s lips widened even more. The very same table he had been sitting at this morning was occupied by the very same beautiful blonde as this morning. She was still holding the red pen between her brightly red lips, and she was still typing on her keyboard like her life depended on it. At the thought his smile disappeared and he frowned instead. What was she doing here all alone and working at – Oliver glanced at his watch – eleven p.m.?

Before he even knew what he was doing, he started approaching her, but she didn’t seem to notice him. Even when he was standing right in front of her, she didn’t lift her gaze from her tablet. Oliver’s frown deepened. Sitting down on the very same chair he had been sitting on this morning, he reached out his hand and boldly pressed her tablet down to the keyboard like you would do with a laptop.

“Hey! What the hell-!” she almost yelled at him, lifting her gaze with an angry expression in her eyes, but stopped as soon as she saw him. The deep frown on her forehead stayed, but the expression in her eyes changed from anger to confusion. “What are you doing here and how long are you here already?”

“Not that long,” Oliver replied honestly. “I came back to get a coffee and saw you sitting here and… Have you been here the entire day?”

“The entire day? Oh, please the few hours that-“ she started, lifting her wrist with the watch to her eyes and stopped with her lips perked. “Oh! O-okay, yes, I- I have been here the entire day.”

Oliver frowned. He knew how easily one could forget time, but it was Christmas or the fourth evening of Chanukah in her case. She shouldn’t be here all alone. It was holidays. “Shouldn’t you be home and spend time with your family and friends?”

The blonde cocked her head. “Couldn’t I ask you the same question?”

“I was home,” Oliver explained. “But my best friend is sick and couldn’t come, my parents act like everything is alright when they are actually fighting and my little sister rather spends time with her boyfriend.”

“I guess that is nothing you want to think about, right?” the blonde asked with an amused grin. “Your baby sister and guys.”

At the expression in his face, she hastily pressed her lips together. Just like this morning, a blush spread on her face, but this time Oliver watched it more closely. It slowly crawled down her long neck and into the neckline of her red dress. He could see the red color even further down in the triangle cutout right over her breasts. Hastily Oliver lifted his gaze back to her face, searching her face for any sign that she had noticed where his gaze had traveled shortly, but she seemed to be too embarrassed by her own comment to look at him longer for a second.

Smiling amusedly, Oliver held out his hand to her over the tabletop, stating, “Hi, I’m Oliver Queen.”

“I know who you are. You’re… Mr. Queen.”

“No, Mr. Queen is my father,” Oliver replied, wondering how she knew about him, but soon remembering that gossip magazines still liked to print his face and make up stories about him.

“I know he is, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be, too. Because I am Ms. Smoak, and so is my mother, so people can share names. Or at least part of their names since we have different forenames, but then she could have named me after her and I will stop talking in three, two, one.”

Oliver knew that he must be grinning like an idiot. For some reason everything she did was making him smile. He wondered about what he could ask her to keep the conversation going when he realized that he only knew her surname, and calling her Ms. Smoak would be too much of a challenge because something about that name made him imagining her in leathern lingerie, tying him to a bed.

“And the forename you are not sharing with you mother is…?”

The blonde bit down on her bottom lip shortly, but then she took his hand and shook it, replying, “Donna.”

“Donna,” he repeated.

Why did he think that name didn’t suite her? Was it a bad thing to think that?

“It’s nice to meet you, Donna.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “My mom’s name, a name I am not sharing with her, is Donna.”

Oliver bit his tongue at the expression in her face. It was like she wasn’t getting what his question had been supposed to ask for. “How much more directly do I need to ask for you to realize that I’d like to know your name?”

She smiled, blushing once more. “Felicity.”

Felicity. Happiness.  
That explained a lot, Oliver thought, smiling at her. For someone with such a happy nature it seemed like the perfect name, much better than Donna.

“So,” he said after a while. “Now you know my family story. What about you? Why aren’t you home and celebrating with your friends and family?”

“I only moved here last week,” Felicity – it was weirdly nice to finally know her name and not have to think about her as ‘the beautiful blonde’ – answered with a shrug of her shoulders. “I didn’t get to know many people, never mind make friends. And my mom lives in Vegas. She is a cocktail waitress, and needs to work, so she couldn’t come here to visit.”

Oliver nodded slowly. “So you decided to spend the day surfing the web? Chatting with your boyfriend I guess?”

Felicity looked at him for a long second, and Oliver bit his tongue. He hadn’t really wanted to say the last questions, but he hadn’t been able to help himself. He needed to know whether she had someone. He had hoped it would be subtle, but of course it hadn’t been. The question must have sounded as awkward to her as it had to him. Before he could make it any less awkward, she breathed a low laugh. When she shook her head, her ponytail swayed from one side to the other.

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” she answered, and Oliver bit the inside of his cheek to stop the grin that threatened to form on his face. “And I am not exactly surfing the web, I am trying to create a new security system that isn’t vulnerable to the new viruses that will soon start crashing a lot of computer systems.”

“You are working in IT,” Oliver said, noticing with frown that he sounded a lot more surprised than intended.

“I actually had a job interview at Queen Consolidated last week, but I didn’t get the job. The guy who interviewed me was kind of a jerk.”

Oliver gulped before he whispered, “Please say it wasn’t me.”

“It wasn’t you.”

“Thank God,” Oliver said in relief, pressing his hand to his chest.

Felicity cocked her head. “But since the tone in your voice when you asked me about IT tells me that you didn’t think that I would work there, what did you think I was doing for a living?”

“I don’t know,” Oliver replied honestly. “I just didn’t think it was tech and I have no idea why because the way you are typing should have made it clear.”

Silence settled for a while. They just smiled at each other and Oliver wondered how long he could smile at her like that without seeming like a complete idiot. When she looked down, her teeth burying into her bottom lip once more and a new blush spreading all over her skin, Oliver cleared his throat, trying to pull himself together.

“Mind if we spend the rest of the night together?” Oliver asked but frowned before she got the chance to answer, suddenly realizing that his words could be understood very, very wrong. “Talking! I mean if we spend the rest of the night together here. In this coffee shop. Talking. Or we could go somewhere else… where we could talk.”

Felicity grinned. “You’re babbling. It is already infecting you. You should run as long as you still can.”

Oliver chuckled, but shook his head. “I think I’d rather stay here. If you don’t mind.”

She didn’t mind and so he stayed. They drank coffee, talked and laughed. And although he had just met her, it felt like he was talking to a friend. He didn’t mind sharing things with her and neither did she seem to mind. The conversation never got awkward because when there was the possibility of things becoming awkward because of Felicity’s rambling, Oliver just brushed his fingertips against her hand or her arm or her shoulder, using the opportunity to touch her, and she calmed down with a blush spreading on her cheeks.

Oliver told her about how he had been a spoilt little brat once, but had suddenly been forced to grow up when his father had had a heart attack and Oliver had needed to take his father’s place in the company for some time, the place he was inheriting one day. He told her about how his best friend was dating his ex-girlfriend which sometimes felt awkward although he was really happy for the two of them because they deserved to be happy. And he told her how he tried to fix all the crap he had done when he had been younger and tried to make up to the people he had hurt.

And Felicity told him about living up in Vegas with a single mom since her dad had left them early in her childhood. She told him about how she had developed her love for science because it had connected her to her father so early. When Oliver found himself at a loss of words, she made a joke to lighten the mood and although the joke was a rather unfunny one, her followed ramble made Oliver smile again. The smile turned into a due to astonishment opened mouth when she told him that she graduated from MIT at the age of only nineteen.

So not everything that was talked about was sad. They also shared funny stories, making each other laugh.

It was so perfect that Oliver completely lost track of time. Only when Felicity yawned three times in a row, shook her head and downed the rest of her umpteenth mug of coffee, Oliver glanced at his watch and his eyed opened widely.

“It’s almost six!”

Felicity yawned once more, saying, “Really? How did time fly by like this?”

“No idea,” Oliver answered, shaking his head, while Felicity was yawning again. “You’re tired. Come on, I’ll walk you home.”

Felicity waved his offer off. “No, my apartment is in Pennytown so basically at the other end of town. I’ll just get a taxi and let myself be driven home.”

Oliver mentally cursed himself for having his car parked in the other direction. He didn’t want to part from her just yet. The last hours he had spent with her had been great, and he just wanted to prolong it a little longer. Just a few hours. While Felicity was packing her things, Oliver watched her, but couldn’t find any way to spend more time with her right now.

“I’ll go pay the bill and then I’ll walk you out and help you find a taxi,” Oliver said after a while.

Felicity looked up. “Oh, you don’t have to-“

“Please,” he said, not knowing whether she was talking about paying the bill or making sure she got into a taxi securely, “both is a pleasure to me.”

She smiled, and Oliver turned around to pay, still thinking about whether there was any way to stay with her for a little while longer, but he really couldn’t find any good reason. He knew that Felicity was tired, so for her it was probably better that he didn’t find any reason. Still it made him sad. Of course he was going to ask for her number, but each more second he spent with her was probably going to increase his chances that she would give him her number.

After he had paid, he turned around to her, finding her with her tablet under her arm waiting for him with a smile. Was it wrong that he quietly wished that there would be no taxi to be found?

“Ready?” he asked, approaching her, and Felicity nodded.

Just when they were about to take the first step, the waitress said, “Hey, you two, you need to kiss. You’re under the mistletoe.”

Oliver and Felicity both looked up at the same time, indeed finding a mistletoe right above their heads. Oliver was the first to look back down again, looking at Felicity. When her eyes found his, she smiled shyly, but hastily said, “You don’t have to.”

Oliver frowned slightly, asking, “Don’t you want to?”

“Oh, I would love to,” Felicity replied and he just knew that she would start babbling even before the next syllable had escaped her lips. “I mean… Not love-love. I just think it would be nice. Not kissing you of course! Although… your lips look like pillow mountains, so I guess kissing you would be so, so nice and- oh my God! Why did I just say that? And why can’t I-!”

“Hey,” Oliver said softly, putting his right hand to her cheek and immediately she shut up.

For a short moment they just looked at each other breathlessly. Oliver waited until he was sure that he could find consent in her eyes before he ducked his head down, leaning towards her and kissing her.

Just a peck, a short touch of his lips to hers, not lasting longer than a second. At least that was Oliver’s honest intention. But the moment his lips made contact with hers, he found himself unable to pull back and away from her. His lips stayed locked to hers, and Oliver expected her to pull away and ask him what the hell he was thinking, but she didn’t. Instead Felicity’s free hand suddenly gripped the wrist of the hand on her cheek gently, keeping him in place. Oliver took another step forward, so his chest pressed against hers slightly without taking the possibility to pull away from him when she wanted to away from her.

Her lips were soft against his. When he breathed in, he could smell her sweet scent. It made him want to taste the inside of her mouth, but he didn’t want to push any more than he felt he already did by not pulling back after the appropriate length of time for a kiss like this, a mistletoe kiss. So he continued to press his lips to hers gently without trying to deepen the kiss.

“Why do I never get kissed like that?”

At the sound of the waitress’ voice, they hastily pulled apart. Oliver lowered his hand and Felicity her gaze. He already missed the feeling of her lips against his and the feeling of her hand wrapped around his wrist to ensure that he wasn’t pulling away.

Oliver cleared his throat. “I think we should go and get you a taxi.”

Felicity nodded, only looking up to him shortly. Another blush had spread on her face. Was it ever going to become less adorable?

He opened the door for her and they stepped out into the cool air of the early morning. Oliver looked up and down the street, only onerously suppressing a groan when he found an untaken taxi waiting at the sidewalk. It seemed like the time to say goodbye was coming much sooner than he had hoped for.

He started lifting his hand to wave at the driver to come here, but even before his hand had reached the level of his shoulder, Felicity put her hand to his, stopping him. His eyes found her immediately. She looked a little nervous, biting down on her bottom lip.

“What’s wrong?” he asked a little worriedly.

“Nothing,” she replied quickly. “I just… wondered… whether… your offer is still on the table… and you would… walk me home?”

Oliver smiled, reaching out the hand she still held in hers to free her bottom lip from the maltreatment of her teeth with his thumb. Her lips felt even softer under his rough finger than they did when pressed to his lips. Nodding, he replied, “I’d love to.”

When they started walking, Oliver’s arms wrapped around Felicity’s waist like it was the most natural thing in the world, and while they walked through the city to her apartment and continued to talk and get to know each other, Oliver couldn’t help but hope that he got the chance to kiss her goodnight in front of the door to her apartment. A man could hope, right?

At some point during their walk Oliver remembered the song that had played when he had been in the coffee shop this morning, finding that maybe Christmas carols weren’t so bad after all.

_So please just fall in love with me this Christmas_  
There’s nothing else that I will need this Christmas  
Won’t be wrapped under a tree  
I want something that lasts forever  
So kiss me on this cold December night.

Whether Christmas carols were good or not, they definitely held some truth for Oliver. Because Felicity did kiss him goodnight in front of the door to her home, and she did fall in love with him, just like Oliver fell in love with her.

 


End file.
